Walter Edmond Clyde Todd

Who was Walter Edmond Clyde Todd?

Walter Edmond Clyde Todd, generally known as W.E. Clyde Todd, was an American ornithologist.

In 1891 Todd abandoned his studies at Geneva College to take up a post as messenger with Clinton Hart Merriam at the United States Department of Agriculture, where his first job was the sorting and cataloging of a collection of bird stomachs preserved in alcohol. In Washington he met many leading scientists including Robert Ridgway, whom he took as a role model.

Discontented with government work, in 1898 Todd contracted with the fledgling Carnegie Museum to collect bird specimens in western Pennsylvania. He soon joined the museum as Assistant, and remained there the rest of his working life, which was much prolonged beyond any normal retirement age. He continued with field work on Pennsylvania, and later in north-eastern Canada, and would later produce two major works, Birds of Western Pennsylvania and Birds of the Labrador peninsula and adjacent areas; along with many descriptions of new taxa and systematic studies based on the Museum's growing collection of neotropical birds. Todd's specialty was the Arctic – he participated in over twenty expeditions before producing Birds of the Labrador Peninsula. He chose the Arctic as his specialty because of a bout of malaria he contracted while working in Washington, DC, which prevented him from working in tropical climates. Despite his inability to do fieldwork in Central and South America, his first book was called The Birds of Santa Marta and focused on a particular region of Colombia. Todd's research was based entirely on the collections of bird skins he had amassed at the Carnegie Museum, but he still won the Brewster Prize for it.²